The MexicoBlog of the CIP Americas Program monitors and analyzes international press on Mexico with a focus on the US-backed War on Drugs in Mexico and the struggle in Mexico to strengthen the rule of law, justice and protection of human rights. Relevant political developments in both countries are also covered.

Mar 6, 2013

Mexico's disappeared

The full human cost of Mexico's bloody drug war during the last six years is only now becoming apparent. Nearly 70,000 people died and more than 26,000 went missing between 2006 and 2012. A scathing new report by Human Rights Watch casts substantial blame for the problem on the country's security forces, which it says have not only been implicated in many of the underlying crimes but have failed to adequately investigate claims by friends and family members of the victims. The result, the report says, is the "most severe crisis of enforced disappearances in Latin America in decades."

Human Rights Watch researchers looked into a few hundred cases and confirmed 149 examples of enforced disappearances by security forces. They described a pattern in which uniformed soldiers or police detain people without arrest orders or probable cause — at their homes, in front of family members, at checkpoints or in public settings. The arrests are almost never officially registered and the arrestees are not turned over to the prosecutor's office, as required by law. When relatives arrive to ask about the detainees, the report said, "they are told that the detentions never took place."

These are familiar allegations. But Human Rights Watch also shows how the authorities fail to follow up or investigate — declining to trace cellphones or obtain footage from security cameras or track the bank transactions of the disappeared. Read more.